Selected Posts
Want to receive a regular email digest of updates?
Ask me and I'll add you to the list: weekly, fortnightly and monthly options available (or daily if you're really keen).
-
We arrived at the Guatemalan border and disembarked to get our exit stamps. Then we waited for the better part of an hour for reasons unknown. A new driver showed up and said we were going to change vehicles here, unlike every single other cross-border trip I've taken, so I had to dash back to the first shuttle to grab my Nalgene and travel pillow (though in the rush I missed my snacks and Cuban trade union baseball cap; not the end of the world as I was going to ditch it before heading to the US anyway).The Worst Border Crossing of My Life
I return to find the group gone, and so I set out into Mexico in the hopes of finding them. Chuckling old men sat on doorsteps point me down random side streets and back alleys and I do, much to my surprise, find the group again. They're loading into the new minibus here because some genius decided the Mexican immigration office should be 5 km in from the border.
We get there, and our driver decides that this would be a good time to tell us that we need a) a photocopy of our passports b) a printed copy of our onward travel ticket c) a printed booking reservation for where we're going to be staying and d) a printed copy of our bank balance. Obviously, 5km into the Chiapan countryside, none of us have any Internet signal, nor a photocopier. My email app doesn't let me access my emails offline (because that's disabled by default, and I haven't changed it on this new phone), and my banking app won't show my balance without an Internet connection; I also learn today that my banking app blocks taking screenshots of it too. Also, I have my phone language set to Spanish, just to further compound the frustration.
We find one place that does copies if you email things to them, but they don't have any Wi-Fi. We find another that does, but is staffed by the world's slowest man; it takes us no less than 40 minutes to get from asking for the password to getting it. Eventually I get everything printed off (I gave to get someone else to take a photo of my phone with the bank app open), and the guy charges me 20 pesos; I only have Guatemalan quetzales and some USD, so I end up giving him $10.
This whole ordeal has taken the best part of 2 hours. As I walk across the road to the immigration office, I spontaneously start singingI hate Mexico, Mexico is shit
. The immigration guy doesn't even look at most of the papers, only the flight booking, which he initally misreads as June 23 rather than July and is about to only give me a 20-odd day visa. Then he realises and acts like I'm el dumbass. He gives me 55 days instead, three more than I need, but whatever.
I have to fill in a customs form. Then he sends me back to fill in more of it, because I was (obviously) supposed to repeat all my details in the second section that was under the section markedofficial use only
. Then I have to go to the bank next door to pay the ludicrous £30 entry tax (and I thought Nicaragua took the piss!)
Finally I'm done, but I realise that 20 pesos the the equivalent of around $1.15. I'm in no mood to get scammed on top of everything else, so I march back to the photocopier and demand my money back; I must've looked like I meant business, because he gives it back.
So now I'm in San Cristóbal for the weekend. I've just spent a grueling day in a packed minibus and am knackered, and still not feeling 100%, so I'm going to get an early night; the Mexican food can wait until tomorrow.
And first thing in the morning I'm lodging support tickets with my bank and email provider telling them they can fuck right off and that I shall be looking at alternatives the moment I'm back home. -
No no, by all means come back to the hostel dorm at 3am, make a load of noise getting into your beds and then sit there having a conversation at normal volume whilst your friend watches cartoons or plays a game or whatever on his phone without headphones. The only way it could have been more representative would have been if two of them had each started playing different terrible reggaeton songs out loud from their phones at the same time. At least a hissedLatinos Sure Love Making Noise
chicos, es tres en la mañana por favor van a dormir
from a very cranky Ben got through to them.
Then, at 5:10, one of their phones started vibrating for an alarm. 10 minutes later it was still going and they were just snoring through it, so this time they got a big kick to their bed and anhijo de puta
instead. -
Plastic pollution this time, rather than noise: San Cristóbal is probably the cleanest city I've been to since Phoenix, there's none of the ambient level of trash that I've come to take for granted here.Speaking of Pollution...
-
This will probably become clearer as I explain more about why I'm in Chiapas and what I plan to do here, but arriving and finding out that the tap water is unsafe to drink because of a massive Coca-Cola factory on the outskirts of town is context so perfect I couldn't have possibly made it up.A Third Kind of Pollution
-
The 100s are a different orientation, and the 20s are a slightly different size and don't have a face side. But other than the absolute incoherence, the notes are pretty aestheticMexican Money Review: [Screaming Intensifies]
-
Never before have I been to a hat store and had them all fit. Truly, Mexicans are brothers in the struggle of having a massive bonceFinally, I Belong
-
It readsOverdramatic Floor Stickers
1.5m for our future
-
MTV Cribs
[The video 'mdf-coffin.webm' has not yet been uploaded, try again later.]
-
Just how narrow were Spaniards 500 years ago?!The Pavements in Every Colonial City Are Like This
-
This group are called Psicolexia; the banner behind them is calling for the release of Manuel Gómez Vázquez, a ZapatistaAttended a Fundraiser Gig
base of support
(i.e., civilian supporter) who has been imprisoned and allegedly tortures for almost two and a half years, for a murder that they argue he was nowhere near at the time.[The video 'rap-group.webm' has not yet been uploaded, try again later.]
-
So reads the sign on the top, followed by:You Are in Zapatista Rebel Territory
Here the people command and the government obeys
.
The sign below it reads:By order of the local authorities and autonomous municipalities, it is prohibited to transit illegal vehicles, rob, assault and plant, traffic or consume drugs.
Smart rules to have in Mexico.
-
On January 1st, 1994—the same day that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into force—armed guerrillas of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) stormed government offices across the state of Chiapas in protest. Predominantly comprised of indigenous people, they fought against the exploitation of their traditional resources that had been happening ever since the Spanish arrived, and which was about to get a big ol' US-style turbocharging (for example, one of the preconditions for Mexico to join NAFTA was that it had to amend its constitution to allow foreign corporate ownership of its natural resources, such as bodies of water; it did so in 1991, much to the delight of the Coca-Cola Corporation, to name but one beneficiary).Who Are the Zapatistas?
People around the world watched as the Zapatistas battled the Mexican military and associated paramilitaries, largely via the then-novel Internet. 100,000 people protested against the repression in Mexico City. After 12 days, the Mexican government declared a ceasefire.
Negotiations were held which resulted in the San Andrés Accords, which promised autonomy and recognition to the indigenous peoples. Then they were routinely ignored. The Zapatistas learned that they could not trust what they call the mal gobierno (bad government) and would have to do things by themselves.
Over the intervening decades, the Zapatista movement has grown to encompass large swathes of the state of Chiapas. The Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities (MAREZ), as their communities are known, have an autonomous system of direct democracy through the juntas de buen gobierno (councils of good government). They also run their own autonomous health system, education system, and more.
They also paint a damned fine mural.
-
The Zapatistas still exist in conflict with the Mexican state, which does not formally recognise their autonomy. Even now, roughly one third of the Mexican Army is stationed in Chiapas (Mexico has 31 states, plus Mexico City). The map on the right shows the rough boundaries of the different indigenous communities in Chiapas, and the one on the right shows military bases in the state.Powder Keg
The Zapatistas are no fans of AMLO, the current president, who is keen to build a train line for tourists through their territories. On top of that, they face off against anti-Zapatista paramilitaries, drug cartels and other unsavoury characters.
Things have been relatively peaceful since the murder of a Zapatista teacher in 2014 (in an attack that left 15 others wounded), but since the start of the pandemic they have witnessed an uptick in paramilitary violence; on the same day that I arrived in Chiapas, an attack on a Zapatista community to the north-east left 7 dead and 3 wounded, and just last week a Mexican newspaper warned thatChiapas is a powder keg that can explode at any moment
.
Many of the paramilitary groups were set up by the government of the '60s–'80s during a period known as theMexican Dirty War
(no prizes for guessing who the murderous right-wing government was backed by). There's evidence to suggest continued government involvement and direction of their activities since then, and given that it's Mexico and at least two of the current prominent drug cartels were formed from units of the military, it's clear that the line between the state, the paramilitaries and the narcos are somewhat blurred. Given that ALMO has staked his reputation on getting his train built, the timing of the uptick in violence certainly seems suspect.
Though the period of armed conflict seemed to have ended during the 2010s, the Zapatistas never disarmed. They used to joke that their guns were merelysleeping
.
-
But all that talk of paramilitaries and sleepy guns is beyond my purview; I'm here in the caracol of Oventik, sometimes referred to as their de facto capital, and one of the few Zapatista communities that are (relatively) welcoming to outsiders. Oventik isn't residential, but it houses offices for several Zapatista projects, which I'll get to later.Oventik
Construction began in late 1995, and was completed a couple of months later on December 31st. The work was all done by hand by a huge group that brought together a range of different indigenous groups, and continued in the face of constant harassment by the military. In a documentary we watched about the construction, we saw the community down tools and line up along the road to hurl abuse at the military convoys that drove past every day for the duration of the construction. Details of each vehicle popped up on screen, including their armaments and countries of origin: France; Switzerland; the USA.
In a lot of the world, globalisation and foreign investment looks like a French-made tank tread rolling through your fields or a hunk of shrapnel withMade in the USA
on its side hurtling towards your face.
-
I'm here to study at the Zapatista Rebel Autonomous Center of Spanish and Mayan Languages (CELMRAZ). I've picked up a lot of Spanish (orBack to School
Castellano
, as they prefer to call it) on this trip, but I've not done any proper tuition, so hopefully after a couple weeks here I'll have polished off some of my rougher edges and had a chance to learn more about the movement.
-
The first day at the school began sat under a tree, talking (in Spanish) about the concept of work. The promotor explained the relationship between two words in Tsotsil Mayan:CELMRAZ, Day 1
a'mtel
andkanal
. A'mtel refers to work that is performed for oneself, for the benefit of one's family and community. For example, the promotores de la educación (education promoters) here at the language centre are not paid for their work; their efforts are recognised as being valuable for the community, and so others in their village look after their fields during the alternating weeks they spend here with us. Kanal, on the other hand, is work done to benefit someone else, be that a boss, tyrant or mal gobierno; it is a corruption of the Spanishganar
(to gain, earn or win, but also to beat or defeat) that came from the experience of having their labour exploited by the Spaniardsb for several centuries.
As someone with a wildly eclectic CV, who has regularly devoted more time and effort to voluntary work than my job and who has been self- or un-employed for about a year now (the line is fuzzy), I like this distinction. In English, when people ask mewhat do you do
, the implication is always what my paid job is, but that's never been particularly well-defined nor interesting to me. I shared a line I like from poet Kahlil Gibran:work is love made visible
.
Later in the day we had another conversation about how we learned about the Zapatistas, followed by the history of Panama and the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua. We ended the day with a documentary, Oventik: Constructing Dignity, about the construction of the caracol we are in now.
-
Obviously, complaining against wage labour is one thing, but people gotta eat. In capitalism, that means they gotta work to get money to not starve. Any attempt to build an alternative system needs to provide a solution to this. For the Zapatistas, as a rural movement composed predominantly of subsistence farmers, this can partly solve itself: people grow what they need, and eat that. Excess is produced and shared with those who can't produce for themselves, and responsibilities are shared and rotated to allow people time to attend political meetings, produce crafts, babysit us, etc.Alternative Economy
The other part of the Zapatista economy, and probably more relevant to we non-farmers, is the prevalence of cooperatives and collectives. Co-operatives are a worldwide phenomena and a surprisingly large one at that: there are some 3 million co-ops in the world and roughly 12% of the world's population work. In co-ops, worker-members simultaneously work for the co-op and own it, ensuring that the benefits of success accrue to those responsible for them. There are no bosses and no extraction of surplus value. Co-ops also usually provide a range of other social services for members, such as low- or no-interest loans for times of financial difficulty.
This is a collective shop that sells goods produced by the women's collective (las mujeres en la resistancia, orwomen in resistance
) of this municipality. Bags, clothes, books and more, and all of the proceeds go to the workers that produced them.
-
Après les cours, le déluge
[The video 'chiapas-rain.webm' has not yet been uploaded, try again later.]
-
For anyone who wasn't around me when I was 6 (what's your excuse, huh?), I pretty much learned English from Calvin & Hobbes books (including this exact one). One of my prized possessions is the three-volume hardbound complete collection, and I immediately pre-ordered Bill Watterson's upcoming new book The Mysteries (pretty much the only thing he's done since 1995, besides some poster art and an audio interview for a documentary in 2014) the moment I heard it existed.Ideal Spanish Learning Material
-
From the Archives: World Book Day 2002
Come to school as your favourite book character
, they said
-
The caracol is in the centre, surrounded by the larger town of Oventic. I've marked the autonomous primary and secondary schools in green, and the red circle is a government school currently under construction.Oventik from Above
-
There are several caracoles (caracol is Spanish forCaracoles
snail
) within the MAREZ. They serve as a sort of meeting place-cum-social space-cum-interface with the outside world; when they were first created in 2003, they were described as beinglike doors which allow entry to communities and which allow the communities to exit; like windows so that people can look inside and so that we can see outside; like megaphones to project our words into the distance and to hear the voice of the one that is far away. But above all to remind us that we should watch over and be responsive to the totality of the worlds that populate the world
(more on that idea later).
The text on the snail's shell reads:Oventik, more Oventik. I can no longer live outside Oventik, and if the bad government wants to destroy us I will not leave here. Always ready to fight, we will make more Oventik everywhere because what I like is to always build more Oventik
-
I asked the promotor why the caracols were called that, and why there were so many snails in all of the murals. It turns out snails are super important in Mayan cosmology, as well as having multiple symbolic properties that are important for the Zapatistas.More About Snails
For one, the traditional way to convoke a meeting in a Mayan community was to blow on a big spiral horn, with the number of blows corresponding to the message being sent: one meant a meeting of all the men, two meant a meeting of everyone, three meant danger, etc. For this reason, the shell shape has become a symbol of communication.
Snails also carry their homes on their backs, and can retreat into them when danger appears. The caracols are similar; when danger threatens a community (such as the army during the construction of Oventik), the caracols become a place of safety and refuge.
He also told me that snails are inoffensive animals that don't attack others. Similarly, the Zapatistas have no interest in conquering others or forcing people to join the movement; one of their core principles translates toto convince, not conquer
. This can obviously be a slow process, and the promotor said that some criticise the Zapatistas for moving slowly. To that they say they go at their speed, like the snail; neither quickly nor slowly.
Lastly, the spiral shape of the snail's shell represents the Mayan conception of time as circular, rather than linear. Capitalism's (and, I should mention, Marxism's) notions of time as a march of progress towards some objective contrast with the indigenous view of it, which makes sense for agrarian communities dependent on the passage of the seasons and still living in ways similar to how they have for the best part of a millennium.
-
The caracol itself (formally Caracol II, as it was the second to be constructed) is built on the side of a hill. There's a long, steep road down the centre with the various project offices off to either side. At the bottom is a clearing with a stage (and basketball court) for outdoor events, and off to the side is the autonomous secondary school that also houses the Centre of Languages. And another basketball court; the Zapatistas really like basketball.You Are Here
On a ridge overlooking the school is an auditorium, which hosts political events, film screenings and more. There are consejos autónomos (autonomous councils; sort of the legislative bodies, and generally only gathered together when something needs discussing) for two of the nearby communities, and the office of this municipality's junta de bien gobierno (council of good government; sort of the executive body, and permanently staffed).
Carcol II is in the community of Oventik (or Oventic, but they prefer the original Mayan spelling), which is in turn is one of 44 communities within the rebel municipality of San Andrés Sacamch’en de los Pobres (Saint Andrew, the White Cliff of the Poor). That, in turn, is one of 7 municipalities in Zona Altos de Chiapas (Upper Zone of Chiapas), which is the 9 zones that make up the MAREZ.
The MAREZ comprised around 360,000 people in 2018, but it's worth nothing that each of those municipalities also contains settlements that aren't formally pro-Zapatista, but are either largely sympathetic or still make use of the services provided by the autonomous government.
-
The Zapatistas emerged from the struggle of indigenous people in southern Mexico for their rights and autonomy, and for the first decade or so following the uprising it remained an insular movement. Even so, foreign support for and continued interest in the movement served as a form of protection that dissuaded the the Mexican government from getting too heavy-handed (generally). But in 2006, the Zapatistas launched theThe Other Campaign
Other Campaign
.
Mexicans voted out the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in the 2000 elections, marking the first time the opposition parties had won an election since the Mexican Revolution almost a century prior. Mexican presidential terms are 6 years long, and so 2006 marked the next election. There was an atmosphere of excitement, opportunity and political ferment.
The Other Campaign represented the Zapatistas' realisation that their struggle was not unique, and they did not struggle alone, but was instead one battleground of many in the fight against capitalism and the state system. In the Other Campaign, they sent their de facto spokesman on a tour of Mexico, meeting with hundreds of groups representing other such marginalised and exploited groups: workers; women; gender and sexual relationship minorities; students; and more. Together they identified the similar (and unique) ways in which the system affected their lives, with the goal of forming networks of support and solidarity and pressuring the Mexican government to reject capitalism and neoliberalism.
For no doubt completely unrelated reasons, the winner of the 2006 election ended the year by sending the Mexican Army into Michoacán state to fight against the drug cartels (though the homicide rate in Mexico had been dropping since 2000). This was the first such deployment and generally regarded as the start of the Mexican drug war that we all know and love. Communities were disrupted, violence rose sharply and the Mexican state massively increased its military and paramilitary presence in much of the country. But despite the best efforts of the state, many of the links formed during the Other Campaign have endured and it remains an important moment in the history of the movement.
The text along the top of the mural reads something like:And in this global rebellion, not only farm and city workers appear, but others also; others who are persecuted and despised for the sole reason that they do not allow themselves to be dominated, like women, young people, indigenous people, homosexuals, lesbians, transsexuals, migrants and many other groups that exist all over the world but that we don't see until they shout out
enough is enough!
And they that are despised, they rise up, and we see them, and we hear them, and we learn from them.
-
Spanish is a gendered language, with the gender of a noun often dependent on whether it ends with anA Note on the Spanish Language
o
or ana
. For example, the word for a male teacher is maestro, whilst the word for a female teacher is maestra. Like many gendered languages, the masculine form is used for the plural form (unless all members of the group are female); i.e. a group of all-male teachers, or a mixed group of teachers, are both maestros, whilst an all-female group would be maestras.
In Zapatista jargon, they often combine both masculine and feminine forms when talking in plural. This ends up being written as either maestroas or maestr@s; I will be taking the latter approach here. -
We started the day with a hike up into the mountains so we could look back down on Oventik and place it into its geographical context. Then we spoke about the Other Campaign and did an activity around it, each taking on the role of a different part of theCELMRAZ, Day 2
Other sector
and describing how capitalism affected us, after which the others had to guess which group we were.
Later I had a grammar lesson, focussing on pronominal verbs. Spanish has some verbs where the meaning changes depending on whether there is a reflexive pronoun (e.g., myself, yourself, ourselves in English) is placed before it or not. For example, duermo (from dormir, meaningto sleep
) meansI sleep
whilst me duermo meansI rest
orI let my guard down
. This being a radical language school, this was taught using sentences like los zapatistas no pueden se dormir por el mal gobierno (the Zapatistas cannot rest because of the bad government
).
Lastly, for the conversational part of the day, we talked about health and the Zapatista healthcare system. There's a hospital and a clinic within the caracol, complete with a couple of ambulances, and the work of the promotores de salud is endlessly inspiring. Like with all responsibilities in the autonomous government, the role of promotor is an elected role, unpaid and reassigned on a rotating basis.
The Zapatista system attempts to combine the advantages of modern medicine with the long-standing traditional medicine of the communities. The promotor explained that traditional Mayan healthcare recognised four distinct areas of expertise: the curander@ (medicine-man, though Google Translate also helpfully suggestsquack
); the hueser@ (bone-setter); the parter@ (midwife); and the yerbater@ (herbalist). For centuries, those were all that were needed; between them, the societal support networks and the strong sense of community, everything just worked (though I suspect life expectancy stats, etc. don't exist for much of this time).
Capitalism, and the damage it wrought on those traditional community ties, introduced new conditions, as well as the supposed solutions to them. For example, he said that Coca-Cola was often promoted as having medicinal properties. As a result of this deception (Chiapas has the highest rate of Coke consumption in Mexico, the country with the highest rate in the world) rates of diabetes skyrocketed. People were then sold pharmaceuticals that would alleviate their symptoms, whilst the underlying issue went unaddressed. This coincides with what I was told at Hospitalito Atitlán, where (though they were by no means radical in their analysis) they identified sudden and relatively recent changes in how people lived (i.e., from outdoor work to more sedentary living) as a major force behind the epidemic of diabetes. Zapatista healthcare services are open to all, and apparently many non-Zapatistas nonetheless prefer to use them over the state alternatives.
I pointed out that modern medicine can also claim many genuine successes, such as the eradication of smallpox and polio. He agreed, and said that the Zapatistas were by no means against modern medicine in general; only its elevation above all other forms of healing, and its separation from the community as something other, specialised and impenetrably technical. The Zapatistas, he said, viewhealth
as comprising much more than just bodily health, but also mental health, social relationships, a sense of purpose, etc. They also focus on preventative work as much as possible; I tried to translatean ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure
into Spanish, as well as the metric system.
I also told him aboutShit Life Syndrome
, the idea within the more radical parts of the UK/US healthcare sector that many conditions that are on the rise in those countries—depression, suicide, reduced life expectancy—are inseparable from the socioeconomic conditions in which people are living, and that treating them in isolation without also working for political change is pointless. He told me about the Mayan concept of ch’ulel, which broadly seems to be some sort of life force (like the Chinese idea if qi, or the Austin Powers concept of mojo, baby) that they believe can be diminished by things like kanal and regained via a’mtel. People lacking ch’ulel drink a lot of Coke or a lot of alcohol as a substitute, he said; recognising capitalist ideology for what it is is is both a result and cause of increased ch’ulel.
In the UK, the rate of increase in life expectancy had slowed over the last decade (and, on a completely unrelated note, we've also had a little over a decade of uninterrupted Conservative Party rule, state plunder and austerity politics). Itbdecreased for the first time in 40 years during COVID, but even before that the difference between expectancy in the most- and least-deprived areas had been growing. Blackpool, a northern seaside town near where I used to live, has the lowest rate in the country at 53.5 years (for males), compared to a national average of 79 (for males) and 82.9 (for females). Almost a quarter of children in my old district live in poverty and Morecambe, the next town over from where I lived, made the news several years ago when local GPs reported that they were seeing a resurgence of poverty-related diseases in children such as rickets.
The UK is the sixth-richest country in the world.
-
Mayan childrearing practices periodically get highlighted in Western media, and they're pretty interesting to observe. From their earliest age, children are encouraged to observe household chores, their parents' work, etc. and to try and help. Play for Mayan children largely consists of miming chores, rather than imaginary space adventuring and transmogrification antics. There is no age segregation in community life, and Mayan children attend events with people of all generations.Mayan Children
They even get involved in the muralling; this one readswithout the children, there is no happiness
.
-
In the (poetic, beautiful, often hilarious) writings of the Zapatistas there is a recurring character called Defensa Zapatista: a precocious, radical young girl who spends her days playing football and hanging out with a cat-dog, a one-eyed horse and several others.Defensa Zapatista
When we went up into the mountains to discuss the Other Campaign, the promotores’ young kids came with us. That gave me the opportunity to snap this, which I think sums up the magic of Zapatismo: a six-year-old girl taking time out of her busy schedule of looking for bugs to sit and listen to a bunch of adults criticising capitalism. Then, it was back to the bugs.
The sheet on the right lists some of the groups that were identified during the campaign as forming theOther sector
: workers; sex workers; peasant farmers; indigenous people; migrants; non-heterosexuals; young people; labourers; and women. The sheet on the left lists what those who participated in the campaign identified as the ways in which capitalism affected their lives: exploitation; pillage/plunder; discrimination; and repression.
-
My grammar lesson revolved around two forms of the pretérito past tense. Spanish is a funky language, with a bunch of tenses that are functionally the same but which differ in what I can only describe asCELMRAZ, Day 3
vibe
. For example, hablé is the simple past form of hablar (to speak
) and used for factual information, whilst hablaba is alsoI spoke
but has some hard-to-define sense of being more sensual, or subjective (and so now I keep thinking of the preterite perfect as thesexy tense
). Truth be told, I'm not sure the distinction is something that'll ever be clear as a non-native speaker, but we had an interesting conversation and I even wrote a short story to practice.
For the conversation part of the day, the promotor explained how Tsotsil has two different words forwe
: jo’utik and jo’ukutik. The former refers to a collective body, whilst the latter refers to a sub-component of that body. For example, within a family jo’utik would refer to all of the family members whilst ju’ukutik would refer to just you. When talking about your community, however, jo’utik would mean the community as a whole whilst jo’ukutik would refer to your family within it. So on up for your municipality/community, zone/municipality, state/zone, country/state. And ditto for the other way, in theory, for you/your cells, your cells/their chemical components, etc. (although obviously there aren't many situations where you would be referring to your cells in the second person). All this reminded me of a book I read some time ago and its idea of theholon
.
He asked me to describe the relationship that I see between the Zapatistas and the flowers nearby. I talked about the need for them to break up the monotony of a grass field; about the large root systems invisible under the surface; and the fact that each plant has many flowers, and one being cut off doesn't spell the end for the plant.
I asked about the pre-Spanish history of the Maya, about which I know pretty much nothing. He said that Mayan society had been highly hierarchical 1,000 years ago (from when many of the ruins that remain today date), but the people eventually decided that they had had enough of kings and rulers, and so moved out of the cities and into tiny rural communities during an event known as la disperción (I did a little looking around online after this, and this would seem to be around the time of the unexplained and so-calledClassical Maya collapse
). When the Spanish arrived some 500 years later, they were shocked to find communities without chiefs or soldiers, who routinely rotated roles between themselves.
I finished by asking about the Zapatista approach to justice. He described how the autonomous government and the official government overlap in many places, and explained that when an issue is only internal to the movement, it is dealt with solely by the autonomous government, but when an issue arises that affects others, or is otherwise relevant to them, the autonomous government will work together with the official government, the church and whomever else has an interest. Ultimately, he said,a problem in the community is not just a problem for Zapatistas; it's a problem for the community
and thatthe ultimate judge is the community
.Todos somos policias
(we are all the police), he added.
I asked what happens in cases of violent crime and robbery. Murder was the highest crime, he said, and would result in the most severe punishment available: expulsion from one's community, with the message passed on to all others to deny entry to the offender. Similarly, working for a paramilitary would incur this sanction, as would sexual crimes after a third offence. The Zapatistas do not allow the death penalty, but they also have no faith in the Mexican justice system. The promotor told me about a paramilitary attack in Santa Marta a couple months earlier after which the government declared it would not be able to find the perpetrators; the community flew into action and rounded them up shortly thereafter. He also said there had been many cases where the government would make a big show of arresting the paramilitaries, stick them in jail for a few weeks and then quietly release them back into the community to cause more damage. The expellee's possessions are then redistributed amongst the community.
For less serious offences (for example, if I were to assault someone), I would be made to pay for any medical expenses for the victim, as well as to work their land for the duration of their recovery, and whatever else the community deemed necessary to make amends. I've also heard of instances where the community has decided to impose a part-time sentence so that the accused could continue to work their own land and feed their family, on the grounds thatif we simply put them in jail, those who really suffer are the family members; the guilty just rest all day in jail and gain weight, but their families are the ones who have to work the cornfield and figure out how to survive
. There may be a requirement to attend educational events, particularly in the case of offences against women.
The Zapatista justice system, then, aims to be restorative rather than punitive. They do have a police role, but like all roles it is unpaid, elected and undertaken on a rotating basis.
-
The Zapatistas have 7 organising principles, which they take very seriously. These guide every decision they make, every structure they build, etc. You can read a more in-depth exploration of them here, but in short they are:7 Organising Principles
- To obey, not command
- To propose, not impose
- To represent, not replace
- To convince, not conquer
- To construct, not destroy
- To serve others, not serve oneself
- To work from below, not seek to rise
-
The phrase at the top readsMany Worlds
for a world in which many worlds fit
, perhaps my favourite of all the Zapatista slogans. The Zapatistas see themselves as just one way of doing things, not the way, and a lot of their work since the start of the Other Campaign (if not earlier) has been them trying to find out more about these potential other worlds they can fit alongside.
I expressed the same view in the one attempt that I've thusfar made to try and articulate my political philosophy (as-was; there's a lot in those articles that I'd change now, but it was over five years ago so I'll cut myself some slack). It seems so obvious to me that communities are organic, emergent things, always in flux, and that attempts to impose order from outside will always be doomed to fail. They are a hundred volumes of water filling a hundred different containers, there can be no single blueprint.
The promotores here agree with me that Zapatismo would make no sense transplanted wholesale into the UK context, or into any other context for that matter, but that makes it no less valid; it is but one world of many. I think a world in which many worlds fit is the one political ideal worth fighting for; not the homogenised gloop of market efficiency or fascism with free healthcare.
-
We also played a board game the other day (how do they know how to laser-target my interests so well?!) That was designed by the collective of promotores here at the language centre. It was a bit like a radical Candy Land, as the players take turns rolling a die to see how many squares they'll move, with the goal of reaching theGames Night
new world
in the centre of the snail's shell. Along the way they land on squares that have them explaining Zapatista organising principles to the group, retreating back to the nearest caracol, obeying tasks decided by the rest of the group (I had to play a tune on guitar one time, and only the fourth one I tried was in tune), etc.
-
I'm pretty on the record about my belief that copyright is bad, so imagine my delight when I saw this on the board game we'd been playing.Copywrong
-
I started with another grammar lesson, continuing to focus on those two past tenses and dabbling a little with the subjunctive mood.CELMRAZ, Day 4
For the conversation, I started by asking what makes people decide to join paramilitaries and fight against Zapatismo, when it seems like it's going against their own interests. The promotor told me about his own uncle who had decided to start a small paramilitary that began causing issues with Zapatistas in the local community (but that the community correctly identified them, rather than the Zapatistas, as the source of the problems, and now the uncle is banished to San Cristóbal). As for the motivation, he explained that there are 5 political parties in Mexico, and each promises (and in some cases even provides) their supporters with money, food, a social safety net and the opportunity to climb the ranks and gain power. They succeed by dividing the people, whilst Zapatismo succeeds by uniting them, and therein lies the irreconcilable conflict.
I was also curious about what would happen in the event of a bad harvest within the MAREZ, given how agrarian the movement is. He explained to me that the promotores put a lot of effort into providing workshops where people can come to learn ecological techniques for farming without pesticides, or for co-planting different things to promote better soil health. He told me about some new coffee weevil that had arrived at some point in the last decade that was quite a problem, and about traditional techniques of leaving root systems during harvest and dividing plots into thin strips with fencing, which retain and catch soil in the event of heavy rain (as most plots here are on the side of a hill). At first I thought he had misunderstood or evaded the question, but then I realised his answer made sense in the context of focussing on prevention rather than the cure, which we had discussed the day before.
Lastly, he told me about the system of organising responsibilities, or a’mtel patan in Tsotsil. All of the various cargos, from the promotores of heath and education, to media work, to the administration of the juntas de buen gobierno to community policing, rotate regularly, without regard to age (provided they're an adult), gender, sexual orientation, etc. All roles are voluntary and require the support of the community; similarly, someone can withdraw at any time. If someone is shown to be manifestly unfit for a role, the community that elected them can also withdraw them, and they can then try their hand at something else instead (in this respect it's not too dissimilar to being a UK Cabinet minister). The roles are unpaid and taking them imparts no special privileges.
The promotor compared this to the imposed government of the state (ajvalil in Tsotsil), which rotates roles between a small privileged group. The root—ajval—meanschief/boss/sir
, and within Chiapas often refers to the 25 families, all of whom trace their lineage back to the Spanish conquistadors, who dominate the state politically and economically. Meanwhile, in England, half of the land is owned by <1% of the population, many of whom can trace their lineage back to the Norman conquest.
We finished the day with a documentary about the Acteal massacre, which the promotores framed against the recent upsurge of paramilitary violence as part of a continual campaign of repression coming from the Mexican government. On top of the deadly attack on the village of Polhó last week, one promotor also told us about a police chief from his home village who had been killed the week before.
This change in the situation here doesn't seem to have registered on the foreign press' collective radar yet, and the Wikipedia page for the Chiapas conflict still only goes up to 2020. I'm expecting to be here for several weeks, so there's always the slight possibility that events may overtake me whilst I'm here, but I made my peace with that already when I decided to come. Que será, será, as they say.
-
It's not hard to see why the terrain here so favours the Zapatistas and has so confounded the counterinsurgency efforts of the Mexican government for 3 decades. It's all undulating mountains and thick jungle, often cloaked in impenetrable fog or flooded with rain. Plus, the Zapatistas have expert familiarity with the land, and are operating in (largely) incredibly friendly territory.The fog is the ski mask of the jungle
It's like Mexican Vietnam.
[The video 'chiapas-fog.webm' has not yet been uploaded, try again later.]
-
When I mentioned that I would be going to Chiapas to one of the other brigadistas in Cuba, he was dismissive of the Zapatistas because theyTankie Takes
hadn't captured San Cristóbal
in the '90s. This seemed like a very weird take at the time, and all the promotores have laughed when I have told them the story. They're a movement of peasant farmers in the countryside, what on earth would they do with a major city, with a population of almost half the rest of the MAREZ put together? What could they grow there?
Another brigadista described this kind of anti-authoritarian revolution asineffectual
. This seems just as obviously wrong, as I can't think of a definition ofeffective
that wouldn't apply to a movement that: has successfully resisted a three-decade long counterinsurgency campaign; has built and continues to build networks of support and solidarity across Mexican civil society; provides healthcare, education and security for a population of hundreds of thousands; effectively put indigenous peoples' struggle for recognition, autonomy and rights on the map for the rest of the world; and launched perhaps the first real successful campaign against the forces of globalisation.
Their achievements in Chiapas are remarkable. The movements they have inspired around the world are uncountable. That they have done all of this whilst also holding true to their commitments to horizontality, persuasion over force and so on is nothing short of miraculous.
Anyway, here's a corn cob wearing a ski mask.
-
Whilst talking to the promotor the other day about the structure of the MAREZ and Oventik's place within them, I noticed that he hadn't made any mention of the Zapatista army (the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, or EZLN). I asked what role they play in the autonomous structures, and he said none, by design. After the San Andrés Accords and the formal cessation of hostilities at the turn of the millennium, the EZLN realised that the army was an inherently inappropriate force to participate in the creation of the autonomous society they wanted—Call in the Army
an army is not democratic
, said the promotor—and so they intentionally set up the structures to exclude themselves. They have no role in decision-making within communities.
Where are the Army now?
, I asked him.
In the mountains.
What are they doing there?
Waiting.
There's definitely an element of mythicality to the Rebel Army in the Mountain. I was reminded of the story of Hereward the Wake, perhaps the best-known rebels to have fought against the Norman invaders. Supposedly born in or near the town I grew up in, he fled into the Fens—the fertile, marshy region of England near where I grew up (think the Netherlands crossed with the Louisiana Bayou)—following the loss of his base on the Isle of Ely, where he disappears from the historical record without any conclusion to his story. The legend goes that he is still there, hiding in the Fens, awaiting the time of England's greatest need.
-
The Zapatistas are well aware that the strategy of the mal gobierno, especially under AMLO at the moment, is to stir up trouble within the various communities in order to try and provoke the EZLN into responding, which would then be used as justification for a massive military response. This, they reckon, is why the recent spate of attacks have not just targeted Zapatistas and their families, as they have in the past, but the communities in general, regardless of allegiance; the government just wants to sow chaos and discord, and insinuate that the Zapatistas are to blame. This is borne out in the government messaging, which talks constantly aboutAd Astra Per Aspera
intercommunity conflicts
and conflates the EZLN with the cartels and paramilitaries that operate within the state.
It seems to be working, to an extent, and the promotores said that their communities, which had previously been supportive of their work with the movement and understanding of their need to divide their time between the community and the movement, were starting to apply more pressure on them to choose between the two obligations. That is an incredibly difficult position for them to be put in as, from their perspective (and, I think, pretty apparently from what I've seen) their communities benefit greatly from the work of the movement, but one should never underestimate people's willingness to act contrary to their own interests when frightened.
The Zapatistas, and the EZLN in particular, are kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place; not responding becomes increasingly difficult as attacks increase in number, scale and blatancy, but any action will be seized on to ramp up the repression and violence. Their best bet is to draw international attention to what is happening as much as they're able, which is why they had called an international day of protest for last Thursday. The hope is that by highlighting the actions of the Mexican state and keeping foreign eyes on the region, they can deter any escalation.
Will it work? I don't know. I think that if the government really wants to pick a fight (and its commitment to several megaprojects in the region suggests that it does) and it can't provoke the response it wants, it'll find a way to conjure up some other excuse. I think the present moment may be amongst the most perilous that the movement has faced, not least of all because AMLO is currently subject to a love-in from much of the international Left. But the path the Zapatistas chose to take all those years ago has never been easy to walk, and their success never guaranteed. But they'll keep organising, as they have done all along, undaunted by the danger because (to quote SupCom Marcos)the heart lies below and to the left
.
-
This sign, which stands outside the entrance to Oventik, reads:The Fourth World War
Bad governments and transnational corporations are destroying Mother Earth all over the world. Stop the war for capitalist interests. No more destruction and state crime! People of Ukraine and Russia, we are the people! Putin and Zelensky are tyrants.
An unusual take to hear in the current media environment. The Zapatistas issued a statement at the outset of the invasion of Ukraine, and I think it's well worth a read.
The stance is consistent with their wider geopolitical analysis. As the Zapatistas see it, the Cold War was in fact the Third World War, and it ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is partly for rhetorical effect, but it is also, I think, factually accurate. We customarily pretend that theCold War
was something other than a war (Wikipedia describes it as aperiod of geopolitical tension
), but I can't really see any definition ofwar
that would include the First and Second World Wards but not the Third. There are an mind-boggling number of proxy wars that took place during this time, and the line between a war and a front is a fuzzy one at best. The four most-bombed countries in history were all obliterated during this period (South Vietnam, Laos, North Korea and Cambodia; the US bombing of North Korea killed an estimated 12–15% of their entire population). The deadliest handful of theseproxy wars
each resulted in the deaths of millions, so the total death toll of the wholeperiod of geopolitical tensions
must surely be staggering, though difficult to calculate.
Ultimately the division even between those three World Wars is debatable. We refer to theThirty Years War
andHundred Years' War
as single wars, though they were not periods of continuous conflict. Similarly, I've seen it argued that the First and Second World Wars were one conflict split by a period of (relative) peace. Someone else I know believes that we are still effectively fighting the First World War, and perhaps historians of the future will agree with her in future centuries.
But the Zapatistas prefer the three-war model, to which they added in 1997 a Fourth World War, currently ongoing. What the neutron bomb was to the Third World War, thefinance bomb
is to the Fourth.Unlike the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki
, writes SupCom Marcos,this new bomb does not simply destroy the polis(in this case, the nation) and bring death, terror and misery to those who live there; it also transforms its target into a piece in the jigsaw puzzle of the process of economic globalisation.
This is the context within which the Zapatistas view their struggle, and as a result theydo not support either state [of Russia or Ukraine] but rather those who are struggling for life against the system
.
-
Our Amazon Package Has Arrived
[The video 'chicks.webm' has not yet been uploaded, try again later.]
-
One of the most well-known Zapatista figures is Comandanta Ramona, seen here on the side of the auditorium in Oventik that bears her name.Comandanta Ramona
The diminutive Tzotzil woman was one of seven comandantas> (female commanders) of the EZLN and she personally led their forces into San Cristóbal de las Casas during the 1994 uprising. She was also the driving force behind the drafting of the Revolutionary Law on Women that formed part of the Zapatista programme since the very beginning (and which I'll talk about more later).
She was heavily involved in the subsequent peace talks with the government, and in 1996 she defied a travel ban to travel to Mexico City for the founding of the National Indigenous Congress; supporters surrounded her to prevent her arrest. Whilst there she addressed a large crowd, highlighting that the lack of a hospital in her city meant that indigenous people faced a 12-hour journey to the nearest one.
Comandanta Ramona fought not only the Mexican state and patriarchy within her own community for a decade; she also battled cancer. She died of kidney failure as a result of the latter in 2006. There was still no hospital in her local community, and she died in an ambulance en route to the nearest one. SupCom Marcos announced that the Other Campaign, which was ongoing at the time, would be suspended for a period of mourning.
Ramona remains an icon for many. Dolls of her are for sale in many of the Zapatista shops, and I would say she's tied with Che Guevara for the second-most appearances amongst the murals of Oventik.
The text along the side of the auditorium, the end of which is visible in the left-hand side of this photo, reads:The boss says:
I'm going to my farm
Mexico
to ask my foreman, my servants and my corporals what's happening, because I don't like it if the labourers don't work.
To organise all the workers in the world with dignified rage, so that there are many worlds where many worlds fit. The capitalist system makes the lie into truth and the truth into a lie. Legal autonomy does not work for the people; it must be an autonomy of the people, for the people and by the people.
A people that do not forget their history is a people that live in resistance and rebellion. A people that do not resist and do not rebel is an exterminated people.
Ramona lives. The struggle continues.
-
Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos is the most well-known Zapatista, having served as the movement's de facto spokesperson since the start of the uprising. Usually seen smoking his pipe through his ski mask, and often on horseback, Marcos has always come with an enticing air of mystery that he has often used to great effect when drawing attention to the movement; for example, the Other Campaign featured him adopting the moniker ofSubcomandante Marcos
Delegate Zero
and travelling the length and breadth of Mexico.
Marcos was originally a university professor, who moved to Chiapas with dreams of teaching the indigenous people about Marxism and replicating the Cuban Revolution in southern Mexico. His academic talk ofproletarian revolution
against theMexican bourgeois
fell on deaf ears, however: when he was finished, the peoplejust stared at him
. As he learned more about their conception of land stewardship and their struggle he soon went, quite literally,native
, joined a precursor organisation to the EZLN and committed himself to supporting the indigenous fight for recognition and autonomy.
As the only English-speaking Zapatista around when they stormed into San Cristóbal, Marcos found himself thrust into the limelight of the international media and became the (ski-masked) face of the movement. As the highest-ranking non-indigenous member of the EZLN (hence his title ofsubcomandante
, as he always remained subordinate to the Army's indigenous commanders), he was a natural choice for trying to forge links between disparate struggles across Mexico; he is also widely recommended as one of the world's foremost Spanish-language writers, and he is in large part responsible for the distinctively whimsical and poetic style of the movement's communiqués.
In 2014, the EZLN announced that SubCom Marcos had been ahologram
and had died; the character of Marcos was retired, and the man behind the mask adopted the new nom de guerre of SubCom Galeano in honour of a murdered comrade. He continues to write and to advocate for the movement.
-
José Luis Solís López, known by the nom de guerreGaleano
Galeano
, was a Zapatista promotor de la educación who was killed in the 2014 paramilitary attack that had, until recently, seemed to mark the end of the period of violent conflict in Chiapas.
Subcom Marcos relates the story of how he first met Galeano when the latter found his way to the EZLN headquarters, across mountains, through jungle and against all the odds, to offer his services. He went on to work at la Escuelita (Little School) deep in Zapatista territory.
The EZLN arranged a meeting with a local paramilitary to discuss the rising level of violence in the area, and to try and find a peaceful solution. The paramilitary attacked the meeting, shooting Galeano and attack him with machetes, then dragging his body away. Several others were injured in the attack, and the paramilitaries also destroyed a school and health clinic.
The EZLN urged calm and conducted an investigation that they claim revealed links between the state government and the paramilitary. As far as I can tell, nobody was ever convicted for the attack, and the paramilitary continues to operate in the region.
But Galeano's name lives on, in the new nom de guerre of Subcom Galeano, in murals and in the names of several educational institutions within the MAREZ. The text of this mural reads:We will sow your life.
For all who give their lives to the fight, they will always be in our hearts.
-
When I was talking to the promotor the other day about the Zapatista healthcare system, I remarked thatIt's the People
this is the where revolution happens; not the dramatic battles or the things you can make a film of, but the daily, unsexy, often boring work required to make a community function. There are no heroes, just a load of people doing what they can.
He agreed, sayingIt's not about [Comandanta] Ramona, or [Subcomandante] Marcos; it's the people.
-
In the grammar lesson we focused on my pronunciation by singing a song—La mar estaba serena (the sea was calm)—with the lyrics changed to reflect some sort of US–Latin America fishing dispute from the 1970s.CELMRAZ, Day 5
La mar estaba serena / Serena estaba la mar
becameLos yanquis quieren robarnos / doscientas millas de mar (the Yankees want to steal from us / 200 miles of sea)
. Then we worked on reflexive verbs. One of the greatest difficulties with Spanish is that many verbs have many different meanings, and at their most complex these meanings can even be opposite to one another and dependent on context, whether you're using the transitive or reflexive form of the verb, whether you have a pronominal pronoun, etc. For example, just check out this list of possible meanings for levantar.
For the conversation part of the day, I asked the promotora what Che Guevara, whose face adorns many of the walls in the caracol, means to her and to the Zapatista movement as a whole. Then we talked about the intergenerational nature of the struggle here; she had been brought up by Zapatista parents and attended an autonomous secondary school the moment one was set up, and the other promotor (her husband) had spent his childhood in the mid-'90s taking food and other supplies up to the guerrillas in the mountains during. This, the promotora said, was a reflection of the way the indigenous communities have always worked; intergenerational households were the norm, and it was traditional for someone to live together with their parents and children and to jointly manage their shared plots of land.
She said that his was the case with her husband, and the two lived with his parents and their two young children. I asked if it was always the case that the wife moved in with her husband's parents and she said yet; I said that that must be difficult for parents who have only daughters, and she agreed. The fight against such traditions that disadvantage women is thestruggle within the struggle
, she said. For example, it was traditional for parents to split their lands between their children when they died, but daughters would receive a much smaller share (though, she added, there were practical reasons for this, as women are less physically able to work the land and so are traditionally relegated to homemaking, cooking, childcare, etc.). However, in Zapatista communities, inheritance must be split equally between sons and daughters. This was just one example of the efforts of the movement to improve the lot of women, dating all the way back to its founding and the Revolutionary Law on Women.
We then spoke a bit about how the communities had experienced the coronavirus pandemic. She said that it had been very difficult, as poverty and lifestyles mean many indigenous people already have several health conditions, diabetes chief amongst these. In addition, she said many had refused vaccination, in part due to misinformation they had found online or in the media and in part due to a (pretty understandable) distrust of the mal gobierno. The promotores de salud were working to educate people around this, and to provide a more trusted source for medical information for a deeply skeptical community, but it was an uphill struggle.
For the final activity of the week, we took turns sharing stories and legends from our own areas. I shared the legend of Hereward the Wake, and then the story of the 1974 East Kilbride Rolls-Royce factory strike that grounded half the Chilean Air Force following the fascist coup under Pinochet the year before (dry summary here; song version here). The others shared tales of man-eating wolves, Mayan spirits and a bison herd off the coast of California. And just like that, my first week at CELMRAZ was complete.
-
Studying at CELMRAZ costs money, which all goes to the junta del buen gobierno to spend on its various projects. On Friday we headed over to pay for the week just past. After some waiting, we were beckoned into the gloomy, warm room. With a huge drawing of Subcomandante Marcos lighting his pipe looking over us, the three guys behind the desk took a look at our accreditation papers and took down the details. Then came the payment; the JBGs take administrative matters very seriously, and the three guys (all of whom were, like with all Zapatista cargos unpaid volunteers who would be rotated for others after a coupe of weeks) meticulously double- and triple-checked everything, including running calculations separately on different calculators to ensure that they all agreed on how much change we were due.Junta del Buen Gobierno
The caracol had been without power since about midday the day before, and one of the guys had been impressed by a chargeable lamp that one of the other students had brought, from which one could also charge phones and suchlike. She said she had several and asked if they wanted some for the caracol; the guy said he would ask the others on the junta what they thought. No decision can be made unilaterally, it seems.
-
A Fresh New Bit of Flair for My Laptop
-
I've still been feeling a little off all week. I'm unclear on what it is, and the symptoms seem to vary wildly from an upset stomach to headaches to fatigue, and then I'll be fine for a few hours. I suspect it's some sort of bug or cold, but I'm in the slightly awkward position of not knowing if I should be drinking more water or if I should limit my contact with the water here more. The fatigue, at least, I assume is either caused or exacerbated by spending all day talking about capitalism in a foreign language.No Me Siento Cien Por Ciento
The upside, though, is that I've realise the above phrase (I'm not feeling 100%
) is very satisfying to say. -
I've been watchless for the last week (take that, capitalist conception ofSchool's Out for
Summera Weektime
!), but unfortunately there's not been enough sun to sort out my awful tanline. But now I'm off back to San Cristóbal for a week to explore the city, chew on what I've learned and practice my Spanish before returning to CELMRAZ next weekend for another week of studies.
-
I got myself some pozol, which is like a watery porridge, for lunch. I also ordered mondongo because it sounded funny, and only after doing so did I look up what it was: tripe soup.Pozol and Mondongo
-
Driving anywhere in this area of the world is a pretty hair-raising affair; I'm not sure the hazard lights button is supposed to be worn like that. The absolute hairiest drive I've had, though, was the shuttle from Lake Atitlán to San Cristóbal: driving in Guatemala as-is looks like one of those illegal Russian street racing videos that were all the rage on YouTube and LiveLeak about a decade ago, and there's no thrill quite like that of being in the oncoming lane very gradually overtaking a sixteen-wheeler, on a road littered with speedbumps, a sheer mountain drop to your left and a blind bend coming up about 20 m ahead.2Fast 2Furious: LatAm Drift
-
I can now safely say that beer and chili do not mixGo On Ben, Michelada is a Local Delicacy
-
The sign reads:Damn, This Bar Saw Me Coming a Mile Off
Talking politics is prohibited
-
Sky Over San Cris
-
Cartels are a fact of life everywhere in Mexico, much as organised crime is pretty much anywhere in the world. Chiapas isn't one of the states that the US State Department and FCDO have declared off-limits, but it still has a cartel presence.Narcos
The Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels are currently fighting for control of the areas along the coast and the Mexico–Guatemala border. They're the two most powerful cartels in Mexico, and whilst the latter is newer, it is already considered the most dangerous; in 2015 they were responsible for downing a Mexican military helicopter during a failed attempt to capture their leader. The Zetas cartel and a couple others also have a presence in the state.
By far the most interesting, though, is the locally-grown Chamula Cartel. It dominates in San Cristóbal and its home town of San Juan Chamula (just outside SanCris, on the road to Oventik) and is perhaps the only indigenous cartel in play. Originally working as enforcers for the Zetas cartel, they apparently reasoned that they may as well use the skills they'd learned and strike out on their own. Now, they are recognised for operating highly autonomously, as compared to the other groups.
In a way, the Chamula cartel is like the dark mirror version of the Zapatistas: what if you took the same sense of indigeneity and autonomy and paired it with the most unrestrained form of capitalism possible, where profit is the only motive, achievable by any means and any level of violence is acceptable in the pursuit of it? What if you took every one of their organising principles, and reversed it? -
Now for a flurry of activity as I can finally put together a load of post-August plans!Antarctica Update: Didn't Get an Interview
-
I though, before this trip, that I would never find a worse system of cash than the US. Then, after Panama managed to add one little extra layer of suck to that system, I thought that surely it can't get worse than this.The Mexican Peso: or, a Crime Against God
Ladies and gentlemen: the Mexican peso. Each note a slightly different size, but with inconsistent changes between denominations, and different printings of the same denomination also being slightly different to one another. Three denominations in different shades of red, except for the newer 20s which are blue (like the new 500s). No faces on the old 20s, portrait faces on the new 100s and the new sub-100s have a different layout to the 100-and-aboves.
Numismatics? More like nu-misery-matics!
-
Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me, O Lord?
-
This is one my favourite passages ever about the Zapatistas, from Lau Kin Chi's essay Learning from the Zapatistas, collected in the book Visions, voices, and practices of the zapatistas (shoutout to Truesey for unearthing the screenshot I sent her over a year ago).De la Seguridad
-
I attended a workshop on the political situation in Chiapas today and, um, this started off as a map of the state.Clear as Mud
-
I'm by no means good, but I am now basically competent at dancing salsa. And with that, and for the low, low cost of 60 pesos [£3] and an hour of my time, I've completed all but of the objectives that I set out for myself at the start of this trip.Also Attended a Salsa Class
No pictures or videos to share, alas. -
Hail to the King, Baby
[The video 'mdf-castle.webm' has not yet been uploaded, try again later.]
-
It's happened enough times and in enough different places, from people who don't seem to have anything to gain from flattery, that I think there must be something to it. Now just to figure our how to take advantage of these bad boys.People Keep Telling Me I Have Beautiful Eyes
-
I got my head down to write up my thoughts on Cuba, and when I resurfaced for air a week had passed and I'd written half a dissertation.I am Not Dead
I've also been studying at the language school for a second week, so as soon as I get this bad boy out you best all be prepared for more murals and politics
-
Just before I left for Oventik again, I attended a screening of a short documentary called Lupita, about a woman campaigning for justice for the Acteal massacre. Expect to hear much more about Acteal over the next couple weeks, but for now you can watch the documentary for free. She joined us for a Q&A after, along with her kids.Lupita
-
Everyone else is in bed, but the French–Belgian couple are laying on the benches in the living room reading Das Kapital to one another in hushed voices, interspersed with giggling. It is very cute, and also one of the strangest things I have ever seen.Das QTital
-
We kicked off the first day of my second week here at the Centre of Languages by running through the geopolitical situation in Chiapas again, for the benefit of the handful of the new students: we are up to 8 from 5 the last week I was here. In the grammar lesson, we clarified a couple of near-synonymous words (e.g. aún and todavía forCELMRAZ, Day 6
still
), but mostly just ended up having a conversation about Chiapas' history (it was originally part of Guatemala). I do miss my one-on-one tuition form the first week; there's three of us in my Spanish class now, plus the promotor.
In the conversation we talked more about Zapatismo and the movement.When you say ¡ya basta! there are consequences
, said the promotor. He talked about how there are no plans, onlythe people in constant rebellion
. I asked about the agrarian nature of Zapatismo, and how much it applied to urban society. We talked a bit about how the largely agrarian EZLN originated in the more urban National Liberation Front (FLN) in the '70s, and the many disappearances during the Dirty War in Mexico. Whilst Zapatismo certainly has a lot of support in SanCris, the promotor said thatla ciudad es mas cerca la bocas del lobo [the city is close to the lips of the wolf]
and was dangerous.
We watched a documentary in the evening called Storm from the Mountains: The Zapatistas Take Mexico City, about their march on the capital in 2001 to found the National Indigenous Congress (CNI). It's a real shame that it's not available anywhere online, because it was full of fantastic SubCom Marcos speeches and incredible scenes, chief amongst them an extended sequence in which a huge crowd of unarmed Zapatistas storm a military barracks, getting into fistfights with bayonet-wielding Mexican soldiers without a care in the world. You can at least get a sense of the speeches from this trailer. Plus, the soundtrack absolutely slaps in a deliciously early-2000s way.
The door says:Everyone can see, we don't need permission to be free. Everything for everyone.
-
This sentiment crops up in all sorts of revolutionary contexts; for example, the Kurds sayTo Exist is to Resist
Berxwedan Jîyan e [resistance is life]
. It is simultaneously a rhetorical commitment to struggle, to oppose oppression and win one's freedom, and a literal statement of fact. That implied equals sign stands for identity; reverse the order and you havelife = resistence
, and what better formulation is there to describe your own body's burning of energy to resist the forces of entropy that are constantly trying to break you down into your constituent elements. You exist because you resist; a people exists because it resists; life exists because it resists.
-
This is one of the Zapatistas' most well-known principles:Para Todo Todos
para todos todo, nada para nosotoros [everything for everyone, nothing for ourselves]
. Perhaps you could call it servant leadership, or any number of other things, but the thrust of it is that everything the Zapatistas have build is structurally designed to dissuade anyone who might want to use it for personal gain. Nobody gets involved in Zapatismo for personal advancement; on the contrary, to commit to the movement is to guarantee that one's life will become more difficult, that one's safety will always be at risk and that one will have to balance many different responsibilities. Nonetheless, there are no shortage of supporters; they know that it is the best path to a world of everything for everyone.
-
The Mexican Revolution was a roughly decade-long period of conflict in the early 20th century. Understanding it is important to understanding a lot of modern Mexico, but this isn't really the place to do it justice, in part because it was a very confusion mess. In super short summary: a bunch of guys overthrew a dictator, then one of them got elected, then kicked out and killed by his own generals, and then the guy who led the coup was defeated by the other guys, then those guys started fighting amongst themselves. Just look at this mess. As ever, the US got involved, but also incoherently: they backed the dictator, then turned on him and supported the elected guy, then turned on him and backed the coup, and so on.The Mexican Revolution, 1920–1920
-
The man on the left needs no introduction. The man on the right is with the phenomenal facial hair is Emiliano Zapata, a Mexican revolutionary who led a peasants movement based around a radical programme of land reform: theZapata Vive
Plan of Ayala
. He governed the southern state of Morelos until his assassination in 1919, implementing his land retribution policies and denouncing President Madero for betraying the Revolution.
Whilst he was defeated, his agrarian reform was incorporated into the Mexican Constitution that resulted from the Revolution and he lives on as a hero of Mexican peasants, including for the Zapatistas (sometimes called neo-Zapatistas) of today.
-
Another key figure in the Mexican Revolution was Ricardo Flores Magón, an anarchist (and therefore My Guy). Through his newspaper he agitated tirelessly against the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship, as well as organising labourers through the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) radical industrial union. He eventually had to flee to exile in the US, where he spent the remainder of his life being hounded (and regularly jailed) by the US and Mexican authorities. When Díaz was gone, he agitated against the former revolutionaries who tried to usurp power; he was so popular that the guy who was elected following Díaz had to falsely claim to be supported by his party to get enough support to win.Magón
After the outbreak of WWI, Magón took an anti-war stance and was caught up in the massive wave of repression that took place in the US against anyone deemed unsupportive of the war. His health weakened by his previous prison stays, he died in a Kanas jail under suspicious circumstances.
I think one of his best (and shortest) writings is The Rifle, a 10/10 piece of radical writing and also a surprisingly good way of explaining the concept of a dual-use technology. That the kids at this secondary school get to study in a classroom adorned with his image is very cool.
-
The banner reads:Bolívar
The US appears destined by Providence to plague Latin America with miseries in the name of freedom.
Those are the words of Simón Bolívar in 1824. Also known as theLiberator of America
andthe George Washington of Latin America
, Bolívar was a Venezuelan general who liberated large parts of South and Central America from the Spanish Empire: what are now the countries of Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Panama and Bolivia. Countries and currencies are named after him today, along with the inter-Latin American Bolívar Alliance.
I've sounded like a broken record on this trip highlighting the myriad ways in which the US has brutalised Latin America. A lot of this has been during the Cold War, but the history of exploitation goes back far, far before that, as this quote shows. One year before Bolívar said this, the Monroe Doctrine was first articulated: this is the foreign policy stance that says that all of the Americas belong, directly or indirectly, to the US and that the US has the right to interfere however it sees fit. This poisonous doctrine has never been abandoned, and turns 200 years old this year.
-
The mural reads:Do You Hear It?
Do you hear that? It's the sound of your world collapsing. It is that of our comeback. The day that was the day was night. And night will be the day that will be the day.
This was a statement issued by the EZLN in advance of a 2013 mobilisation that saw tens of thousands of Zapatista civilian supporters occupy cities across Chiapas, marching in symbolic silence, demonstrating the strength of the movement.
-
The beam along the top reads:There Are Some Who Fight for a Day
There are some who fight one day who are good. There are others that fight for a year that are better. But there are those who fight all their lives, those are the essentials.
The white text in the centre reads:We are equal because we are different
.
-
I think there's an idiom or pun here that I'm missing, what with the socks andStand to Fight
pie
also meaningfoot
.
-
We started by heading back up into the mountains along with 25-odd students from the autonomous secondary school (there's about 40–50 at school this week, so the caracol is a lot less tranquil). There we sang songs (me and the two Americans contributed an all-baritone rendition of the Diggers' Song) and danced a conga line in the forest:CELMRAZ, Day 2
in Zapatismo, everything is possible
.
For the grammar part of the day, we played a game invented by the Surrealists in which pairs of cards forming conditional sentences (e.g.,if wishes were fishes, we'd all swim in riches
) are divided up and mixed and we each took turns drawing them to form new sentences: some profound, some funny, some meaningless. We ended up talking about co-operative board games and the way the autonomous secondary school uses Monopoly to teach the students about how capitalism works. We also looked at the history of Mayan resistance stretching back to 1712 uprisings and rebellion of Jacinto Canek against the Spanish. We were taught the termel mandón
, which means something akin to
bossy
. The people of Chiapas have called many things el mandón over the centuries: in 1994, el mandón was neoliberalism; in 2005, el mandón was capitalism. All of this, said the promotor, went back to the cultural memory of the Mayan collapse and the new forms of living that had to be developed following it.
To start our conversational practice, we were told to go off and find something—a space, a tree, a plant, whatever—to go and have a conversation with for 10 minutes. I found a nice clearing with a little abandoned hose in it and sat listening to the birds, the insects and the wind whilst wondering what I was supposed to be doing. When we got back together, the promotora explained that Tsotsil does not have any word that is the equivalent ofthings
, onlyexistences
. This is because the language does not contain the concept of a grammatical object; the closest I can get to explaining how this works is to say that rather than sayingI write with my pen on this notebook
, you would be saying something likeMe, the pen and the notebook together write
.
We also looked at the concept of ch'ulel again, with the promotora explaining in the context of what we'd just learnt that it is the result ofthe mutual recognition of existences
(so maybe more like theinner light
in Quakerism than Austin Powers'mojo
). She explained that in Mayan culture, one would ritualistically speak to a tree before cutting it town in order to ask its permission (I'm not quite sure how you're supposed to gauge that the tree is cool with the chopping, though). But ch'ulel also seems to mean something likeconscience
. She said that it is always present, but sometimes only very small; I asked whether paramilitaries have ch'ulelito, which got a chuckle.
-
It was, in part, a Coca-Cola plant that kicked off the 1994 Zapatista uprising. They are well aware that Coca-Cola is the enemy, and yet, big red trucks wind their way through the town of Oventic regularly and the shops within the caracol all stock the brown stuff. Mexico is the world leader in Coke consumption, and Chiapas is the Mexico leader. But the Zapatistas aren't about top-down decrees and banning Coke; the promotores say that as people organise and educate themselves, they naturally start to shift from drinking things like Coke to fruit juices, traditional drinks, etc. Giving up Coke is both a cause and a result of growing ch'ulel.Together We Can
-
The very first Zapatista writing I ever encountered was a passage from The Wall and the Crack, and it still one of my absolute favourites. You can read it in full here, but the specific section is from the subheadingThe Wall and the Crack
The Wall and the Crack
about halfway through until the lineIf you were to ask them, they would respond...
.
No one asks the Zapatistas anything. If they did, perhaps they wouldn’t respond. Or maybe they’d say about their absurd effort:
You think we’re trying to take down the whole wall? It’s enough to make a crack.
-
The Zapatistas talk a lot about theCapitalist Hydra
capitalist hydra
, which is also in the name of one of the collections of their writings that I was reading at the start of this trip.
The text at the top readsttogether we are destroying the monster of capitalism
, whilst the heads of the hydra are labelled:exploitation
,discrimination
,plunder
,neoliberalism
,repression
,patriarchy
andegoism
.
-
TheThe
Mayan
TrainMayan Train
is one of the megaprojects that the Mexican president is pushing to build, and part of the reason for the increasing violence in Chiapas. The train will connect Mayan archeological sites across the Yucatán Peninsula and ferry tourists between them.
Part of the problem here goes back to that Mayan conception of time as circular rather than linear. Whereas we consider those sites as abandoned and historical, the Maya consider them as still an active part of their culture and history, and would rather not have a bunch of gringos bimbling around in their sacred temples.
There's also the practical impact on the environment, as well as the fact that (as this anti-train poster shows) this so-calledMayan Train
is really a German project.
-
Slow, But Advancing
-
Still a couple of months till I get back, so get procreatin’ everybody!I've Accidentally Bought a Bunch of Baby Bibs as Gifts, Thinking They Were Bags
-
We started the day off clearing vegetation from the coffee field, and as I've done very little physical recently I ended up sore for the remainder of the week.CELMRAZ, Day 8
In the grammar lesson we played the Surrealist game again, but with cards we had written ourselves. I mentioned how anthropologists have described Mayan kids as not taking part inimaginative play
as much as their counterparts in places like the US, and the promotor explained how the children here live in close connection to nature and within the Mayan cosmovision, so theydon't need to invent unicorns
. We also looked a few Spanish idioms, because I'm keen to transition from talking good English-with-Spanish-words to actually speaking Spanish.
In the conversation the other two students asked a bunch of questions about how the cargos and juntas de buen gobierno work, which I had already covered in the first week. Week #1 was definitely better than #2.
-
I found out about the Zaptistas through the Kurdish Freedom Movement, and there are many similarities between them: both recognise capitalism and the state as the primary threat to their ways of life and both have built complex antiauthoritarian structures. There have evidently been several people involved in the movement through the school, because there are murals and posters dedicated to the shared struggle all over the place: this one readsKurds and Zapatistas
long live the Kurdish and Zapatista struggles!
-
Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, a.k.a. Tortuguita [little turtle], was an American environmental activist who was gunned down by Georgia cops at the start of this year. The cops initially claimed that Tortuguita had fired on them; an autopsy found no gunshot residue on their hands and wounds consistent with having their hands raised,Tortuguita Lives
most probably in a seated position, cross-legged when killed
. Bodycam evidence also suggests that the cops shot each other by mistake. Cops lie.
Tortuguita was part of the Stop Cop City encampment trying to stop the construction of a major urban police couterinsurgency training centre that would also mean destroying a load of forest and (I'm sure coincidentally) bulldozing the site of of an old prison that was recommended to be preserved on the National Register of Historic Places because of the abuses that were committed there. There is widespread opposition to the project, but the local council responsible recently voted to go ahead with it anyway.
Several other Stop Cop City protesters are currently facing domestic terrorism charges, in the first such use of such state law. This has been condemned by just about every human rights organisation going.
None of the things I've been talking about all the way through this trip are confined to 200 years ago, or the turn of the century, or the Cold War. They are all part of currents that continue to the present day. Brutality committed in the periphery always comes back to haunt the center; in Britain this was referred to as the coming-home ofimperial policing
.
The passage down the left reads:
In memory of Tortuguita, who was assassinated by the police on Jan 18, 2023, whilst fighting to defend the Weelaunee Forest in Atlanta, Georgia, USA from the construction of a new police training centre,
Cop City
, and a huge Hollywood stage,Hollywood Dystopia
. Following his assassination, more than 30 defenders of the Weelaunee Forest have been arrested, accused of domestic terrorism and denied bail. Whilst our comrades are in jail, the fight goes on.
-
From Standing Rock to Chiapas, stop the poisoning of our earth
-
Occupy Sandy was an anarchist-led relief response to Hurricane Sandy that originated from former Occupy Wall Street members. They focussed on mutual aid over charity, used then-novel tools like Amazon wishlists to allow people to easily donate needed goods.Occupy Sandy
They were begrudgingly recognised by the Department of Homeland Security as more effective than established organisations like the Red Cross and Federal Emergency Management Agency, and there's an entire very interesting book that examines the movement in depth.
-
For my penultimate day at the school, I wanted to find out more about the theoretical side of the Zapatista movement. The EZLN Wikipedia page describes them as Marxist (amongst several other things) and I'd already had a conversation in my first week about why there were so many pictures of Che Guevara's face. The promotor said that Zapatismo is a practice, not an ideology, philosophy, doctrine or theory. He talked about how the symbolic references for a movement depend on where it is, and talked about how Latin Americans often comprehend things sensually, rather than rationally. He quoted Surrealist Andre Breton who, upon arriving in Mexico and seeing a cow walking in front of a cathedral, declared thatCELMRAZ, Day 9
This is Surrealism!
We also talked about Zapata's agrarian reform and the Mexican Constitution, and discussed how land ownership and work distribution work in Zapatista communities, delineatingcollective work
(i.e., the necessities of the community, like building schools),communal work
(e.g., seed planting) andco-operative work
(e.g., the shops in the caracol, which operate to generate money).
The distinction between the grammar classes and the conversations was pretty fuzzy all of this week.
In the actual conversation part of the day, we talked about the concept of buen vivir (literallyliving well
orthe good life
). The Zapatistas recognise that this is the goal of any liberatory movement and that it will look different in very culture, person, etc. The promotor talked about industrial society as new and superficially nice-looking, but in reality it creates perceived needs that everyone got along fine without before, and creates new problems that it claims to be the solution to.
She talked about health problems in this context, pointing to the increases in diabetes and cancers. Diabetes (as I've talked about before) is pretty clearly linked to lifestyle changes, but increasing cancer rates are generally related to people living longer and thus having more time to develop them. On this note, I asked her whether there is a similar concept of buen mourir [dying well], because there are certainly people who argue that just living as long as we possibly can is missing the point. She talked about the Mayan approach to death, seeing it as a passing to another dimension or place, and the Zapatista idea of adignified death
within the struggle (not necessarily in combat).
Lastly, we talked about the next generation of Zapatistas, currently studying at our very location. I heard elsewhere that some 90% of young people in Zapatista communities choose to get involved in the movement, and they were certainly enthusiastic singing the songs up in the mountains the other day, but financial realities and the deteriorating security situation are also leading to a lot of young emigration to the US for work.
-
In the '90s, apparently a third of the EZLN armed guerrillas were women, along with around half of the civilian supporters. Women's liberation has been part of the Zapatista programme since its very founding. As an example of some of the social changes that the movement has brought, our promotora told us that when they first suggested having female teachers in the early 2000s people thought the idea was mad. Similarly, educating girls was never considered important until the autonomous schools began to change people's minds.When a Woman Advances, No Man Retreats
-
The Zapatista women are fierce, which is all the more impressive since the Maya are not a physically imposing people. There's a lot of footage of diminutive women squaring off against Mexican soldiers twice their size, often armed, particularly from protests following the Acteal massacre. This picture is pretty incredible, but for a video version check out this documentary (at 29:56) as young and old women link arms and physically push the Army out of their community, at one point literally lifting a guy off of his feet.Cojones
-
The Women's Revolutionary Law was declared in 1994, as the Zapatistas stormed Chiapas. It had been a long time in the making, and Comandanta Ramona et al. faced a lot of skepticism and challenges, even from within the movement, about it. The Law contains ten declarations, which you can read here. The first of these is written along the bottom of this postcard and reads:Women's Revolutionary Law
women have the right to participate in the revolutionary struggle in the place and at the level that their capacity and will dictates without any discrimination based on race, creed, color, or political affiliation.
-
The text reads:The Women and Men of Maize
May your food be your medicine and may your medicine be your food
Our dreams do not fit in their urns [though urnas also meansballot boxes
]. Neither our nightmares nor our dead.
-
The promotora said that some of the social programs, like the mujeres de dignidad [women of dignity] were still piecing themselves back together following the disruption of the pandemic, and we didn't see this particular office open whilst we were in Oventik, which is a shame.Mujeres de Dignidad
-
Our Lady of Guadelupe is a Mexican title for the Virgin Mary, based on a supposed series of visions that a guy had at the site of what is now a basilica in Mexico City. There's some theories that this was a Catholic recuperation of a pre-existing indigenousGuadelupe
earth mother
figure who was worshipped at the same spot, and as a result devotion toOur Lady of Guadelupe
became a safe way for indigenous people to express their traditional religious views under the Spanish.
She's considered the patroness saint of Mexico and has huge cultural significance here; she's also apparently the unofficial patroness of indigenous people, migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. Many clinics and hospitals here are named after here, and the ones in the caracol are no exception.
One of the other students here was telling me that Latin American migrants who make the perilous trek to the US will almost always carry an icon of the Virgin Guadelupe. She also talked about a coroner who started photographing the handful of possessions that were found on people killed by the US border regime (at least 850 in 2022): the Virgin would invariably be amongst the one or two items they deemed essential for their journey, hoping to invoke her protection.
-
The Lady of Guadelupe has also been used as a symbol for political movements in Mexico for at least a century. Nowadays, she appears wearing a gas mask asVirgin of the Barricades
the Virgin of the Barricades
.
-
My final day at the Centre of Languages began with a conversation session. I asked about how the autonomous secondary school works, and what a typical day looks like for the students. The promotora explained that the students board for two weeks each month for around 2–3 months at a time, and are split into groups who take it in turns to be responsible for communal tasks (cooking, chopping wood, etc.). They attend classes from 9 till 5 (although sometimes we would be woken up around 5:30 by them playing basketball or guitar, because they're used to getting up at the crack of dawn back home). From 3 till 5 they're free, and then they get back together for a group activity between 5 and 7.CELMRAZ, Day 10 (Part 1)
She said that some of the promotores were barely older than the students, and would often get involved in basketball, etc. too . After three years of secondary education, the students then choose an autonomous project to get involved with, be that with the health system, education system, media collectives, etc. In theory they could go straight to work for the junta de buen gobierno, but she said they usually start with something smaller unless they have a lot of experience already.
The classes provided include maths, history, humanism, social sciences, natural sciences, physical education, art, languages and health (which includes sex education, which is traditionally never addressed in most of the communities). Students sleep in gender-segregated rooms, but the school is otherwise co-educational. Men and women were traditionally prohibited from working together, so this is another way in which the movement is changing people's perceptions: things are always improvingpoco a poco
[little by little].
Whilst this is the only autonomous secondary school for the whole zona (hence the boarding; students came here from all different municipalities), the autonomous primaries are dotted around every municipality and students don't board at them. She said there was no strict starting age for those, and that kids were welcome to start attending whenever they wanted, or even to attend specific subjects if that was all they were interested in.
-
Then we talked about how food production works in the MAREZ. Our zone, Zona Alta, struggles due to having little fertile land. Fertiliser is a necessity, and the promotora said that the bad government provides chemical fertiliser from Monsanto along with seeds. These are bad for the land, butCELMRAZ, Day 10 (Part 2)
people need to make enough food
; she said this one of the primary drivers behind emigration to the US. Other zones within the MAREZ, though, produce all they need and even a bit of surplus.
Chiapas does not lack for fertile land, but the bulk of it is held by the large-scale rancheros and finceros; we again returned to the 25 rich families that appropriated that land under the conquistadors and continue to dominate state politics now. The promotora also acknowledged that life was not perfect before the Spanish conquest, but that a lot of conservative practices that they are fighting in the communities were not originally Mayan, and instead were introduced by the Spaniards (see also, the role of women in Britain pre- and post-Normans).
For the final grammar lesson, we actually did a bit of grammar! We touched on conditionals, the subjunctive mood and various irregular verbs, as well as how to pronounce theü
that occasionally appears in Spanish words. Then we all reviewed a piece of homework I'd been given over my week off, in which I practiced two types of past tense by writing about my main man Albert Camus. Given that I was in a class with the French–Belgian couple, that led to a final conversational digression on the subject of French and Belgian colonialism. We finished with one last song, La hierba de los caminos [The weeds on the roads], which ends with the following stanza:
¿Cuándo querrá el Dios del cielo
Or, in English:
que la tortilla se vuelva (¿Cuándo querrá Dios del cielo
que la tortilla se vuelva)
Que la tortilla se vuelva
que los pobres coman pan
y los ricos mierda, mierda?
(que la tortilla se vuelva
que los pobres coman pan
y los ricos mierda, mierda.)When will the God of the heavens want
that the tortillas return
(When will the God in heaven want
that the tortillas return
that the poor eat bread
and the rich shit, shit
(that the poor eat bread
and the rich shit, shit
Lastly but by no means leastly, we spend a chunk of time in the afternoon learning how to make tortillas.
-
In 2014, 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College were kidnapped by police and disappeared. Initial government cover-ups were gradually collapsed following years of dogged campaigning from the families of the missing (supported by, amongst others, the Zapatistas). They began to reveal a web of collusion between the cartels, local and federal police and even the Army which is still being unravelled now. Only two of the students have had their remains accounted for. Literally today, the former head of a federal anti-kidnapping force was arrested in connection with the disappearances.Ayotzinapa
The text at the bottom of the mural reads:You will no longer be you, now you are us
. Its hard to see, but the star on the back of the chair has the number 43 inside it.
-
The Tercios Compas are the Zapatista's media collective, and like all good things their name is a pun. The story goes that the Zapatistas were hosting a conference and the mainstream media showed up asking to be let in, and calling themselves theLos Tercios Compas
medias compas
[friendly media]. The Zapatistas felt that they were biased against them and laughed them off ashalf-comrades
(medias can also meanhalf
). Realising they needed some way of producing their own media and telling their own story, they founded the Tercios Compas, or theone-third comrades
.
Another media effort from the Zapatistas is the Radio Zapatista project, a community radio network that reaches all across the state. It's not unusual, once you know to look out for it, to see groups of people huddled around a small radio listening to recordings of SubCom Marcos speeches, or local movement news, or even just local news in general: it's not just Zapatistas that tune in.
-
Yesterday I spent the day at the first of two more prep workshops for the thing I'm going to be doing next. We covered... the history and geopolitical context of Chiapas! For like the third or fourth time now!San Cristóbal? More Like San Cris-sucks-balls
I was very hungry at 12, even hungrier at 13:15 when we finally broke for lunch and so hungry by the time they'd finished nattering at 13:40 that I shouted at someone when they said the guy leading the workshop wanted to join us after picking his son up from school, so we wouldn't even be ordering until 2. In any case, he arrived late.
We went to a vegan café that the other guy suggested; they didn't have any choice, it's the menu of the day or bust. The meal on the board actually sounded great—stuffed plantains—but that was yesterday's meal: we got a thin broccoli soup and a meal I could best describe asappetiser-esque
. I tried to get some money out, but I think it was some sort of social service payout day and there were queues around the block for every cash machine.
We returned for more workshop, but no Spanish was going into my brain at this point. Back at the housing co-op thing I'm staying at, they had a house assembly that evening. Despite my best efforts and the fact I'm only staying here for four nights, attendance was mandatory (I was not told about any of this before I arrived), so I had to sit and listen to a bunch of people I don't know and don't have the time to get to know check in with their biggest adventure of the week, and discuss housing matters that I couldn't give less of a shit about.
One of the housemates has been ill, and I've picked up her cold so spent the night spluttering on my own sinus juice instead of sleeping. This morning it has gotten worse, and I only have so many sachets of Lemsip. I spent what little morning I had playing musical showers because none of them had hot water
I went to collect the laundry I'd left on Saturday, and which I'd been told would be ready by Mon afternoon. They didn't open till 9, so I went out for a breakfast of cold scrambled eggs. When I came back, they said they wouldn't be ready until the afternoon, and that they closed at 2: based on the previous day's experience, I wouldn't be back in time to pick them up, so I took the unwashed clothes and am now three days into my current pair of pants.
The cash machines still had massive queues this morning, so no money for me. This cold is doing my head in, and on the walk back to our place for a long lunch break I smashed my toe into the kerb and had to walk halfway across the city with my flip-flop getting increasingly sticky with blood. And now I'm back in time to have collected my laundry, had I left it at the launderette.
Sometimes you have a period of time where everything fucking sucks. I'm two days into one, and if I don't vent I'll scream, and I had a good tryout for a future sailing career when I hit my toe. I hate San Cris, I hate Mexico and I'm fully fed up; at least I'll be rid of the place tomorrow.
-
Of course the pinche washing machine in the pinche house is only for the pinche housekeeper. And of course the pinche housekeeper left 20 mins ago so I can't ask her. And of course the only pinche launderette that was open charged me six times as much as the original one to get my clothes done by this pinche evening. And of course it took me a pinche hour trying to find a pinche cash machine that hadn't been drained this pinche morning.Wonders Never Cease
Sing it with me now if y'all know the words:🎵 I hate Mexico 🎶 pinche Mexico is shit
-
I've had a nap and a coffee, I'm wearing fresh pants and I'm Lemsipped to the gills. Tomorrow I shall leave this godforsaken place, but not before I egg that pinche launderette to within an inch of its life.Amelioration
-
Tomorrow morning I'll head out with another guy (who, coincidentally enough, I met at the Centre of Languages my second week there) to the village of Acteal. We'll be spending two weeks there as a two-man team of human rights observers, as part of the Civil Obvservation Brigades (BriCO) programme (original Spanish here, English version here).Now What?
Acteal itself isn't a Zapatista community, but it's run by a sympathetic Christan pacifist group called las abejas [the bees] who are organised similarly, with health and education promotores, rotating positions, etc. If you watched that Lupita documentary I shared a few days ago you'll know a bit about the history and situation there, which largely revolves around the 1997 massacre, for which the abejas (many if whom were survivors of the attack and who lost friends and family) continue to campaign for justice.
The settlement itself sits slap-bang in the middle of the multi-directional Chiapan conflict that I've been describing for the past few weeks. Nearby villages have received an influx of people displaced from other villages in the region (such as Polhó, which was the site of the fatal attack on a refugee house that I mentioned the day I arrived in Chiapas), cartels and other criminal groups funnel drugs, arms and humans through the area and a suspiciously well-armedself-defence
militia recently appeared in the nearby town of Pantelhó, who nobody seems to trust. There also seems to be another armed group in the area that don't have a name and nobody knows much about. On top of this is all the usual murky involvement and harassment from the police and military.
The abejas' dogged campaigning finally resulted in the Mexican government admitting responsibility for the massacre in 2020, but they continue to push for the then-President (and several otherintellectual authors
of the crime) to be tried in court.
We'll be there to document any human rights abuses or security issues and to keep the organisation that's sending us informed about the developing situation. We'll be stuck within the small camp pretty much the whole time—the road outside is considered unsafe, as is just about all of the surrounding area—so I loading up my e-reader with books, my laptop with films and my luggage with a guitar. With any luck we'll have an uneventful fortnight, and maybe I'll even manage to pick up Teeline.
However, given that there might not be a lot happening, and that we've been asked not to share any photos we take until we get back, expect the tracker to be a bit more quiet than usual for the next couple weeks. -
The organisation who run the BriCOs are named after Bartolomé de las Casas, the 16th-century bishop of the area who spent 50 years speaking out about Spanish colonialism in the Americas and the violations of the native peoples in the area, as well as against the institution of slavery. Interesting guy, and just like when people defend historical figures who did terrible things (e.g. owning slaves) becauseBartolomé de las Casas
it was a different time
it's worth noting that there have always been contemporaries who knew that the systems were wrong, be they the abolitionists, Bartolomé de las Casas or whomever.
-
Both sides of the 500 are face sides! One side has Frida Kahlo, whilst the other has this Admiral Ackbar-looking hombreThe Mexican Peso Sinks to New Depths
-
Our arrival coincided with a multi-day fiesta for San Pedro (Saint Peter), the patron saint of this region. We were treated to a brass band, fireworks, chicken soup and locally-made coffee, and drinking the water here thusfar does not seem to have done any harm. Most importantly, I am finally elevated off the ground the way the good Lord intended, for the first time since arriving in Mexico. Things are looking up.Arrived in Acteal
-
The View from Our Back Porch
-
At long last, I'm ready to get my PhD. in Cuban Studies!New Blog Post: Cuba
n which I insist on poking everything to see if the walls are real, get involved several political arguments and finally feel a pang of national pride for the first time in recent memory. ¡Viva la Decimosexta Brigada!
Read it here, and maybe make a brew before you sit down. -
The Drive to Acteal
[The video 'acteal-drive.webm' has not yet been uploaded, try again later.]
-
The San Pedro Parade is Here
[The video 'san-pedro-parade.webm' has not yet been uploaded, try again later.]
-
Now, what's that all over their frames…?Dancing Cows
[The video 'acteal-cows.webm' has not yet been uploaded, try again later.]
-
Launching fireworks by hand, under a tree and besides a building, and often with a lit cigarette in the same hand: how does anyone here still have hands?Fireworks
[The video 'acteal-fireworks.webm' has not yet been uploaded, try again later.]
-
Oh, Thats What Was All Over the Frames
[The video 'acteal-cow-fireworks.webm' has not yet been uploaded, try again later.]
-
Las abejas
-
Acteal Church
-
We're not perched quite so precariously over the side of the mountain as our neighbours; there's ground below our windowsView from Our Window
-
10/10 Sunset
-
It's fine for the two of us, but the last brigade was 5 people and I've heard of larger ones than that: how?Our Gaff
-
Anyone fancy getting married?An Important Anniversary
-
How to make a pair of brews when all of your pots are busyIngenuity
-
A new armed group appeared in Pantelhó (up the road) and may or may not have taken over the town hall. They demanded that the Army to come in and kick out the self-professed autodefensa [self-defence] group El Machete, who they accuse of being a criminal group and responsible for several disappearances, or they'd do it themselves. Only the Mexican news is covering it as far as I can tell.Halfway-Through-the-Brigade Update
The government are saying everything's under control, and from what I gather there's a lot of cops and soldiers in Pantelhó and the roads leading up to it now.
In terms of Mexican DEFCON levels this seems to be somewhere above anay-ay-ay
but below adios mio
; in the British system that's somewhere between akerfuffle
and anoh dear oh dear
. -
Today is the second anniversary of the assassination of Simón Pedro, a human rights activist and member of Las Abejas. TheSimón Pedro
material author
of the murder (i.e. the hitman) was sentenced to 25 years in prison this March after a much-delayed trial, but no effort has been made to find the intellectual masterminds (as ever). His assassination came a few days after he joined the local authorities in a meeting with the state government to ask for their intervention in combatting the criminal groups rife in the area.
We helped to paint a banner for a memorial gathering over in his hometown of Nuevo Israelita.
-
5 days to do and we're running low on fresh food, so I present: apple–chipotle rice. It wasn't even half bad.Culinary Experiments
-
I have a little over a week to kill between the end of this Brigade and my flight from Mexico City. I was going to spend it at the beach, but that's not looking so viablePost-Brigade Plans
-
This is the gathering place/central plaza of the hamlet, with the victims of the massacre buried beneath. If you watched that Lupita doc, you'll have seen here speaking here.Tierra Sagrada
The banner reads:Welcome to the sacred ground of the martyrs of Acteal. 25 years of memory. 30 years if our flowering resistance. 25 and 30 years of weaving peace.
-
…then you notice all the helicopters they draw onto their pictures (they'd been flying overhead pretty much every day we've been here). And then one of them starts singing “Bella Ciao” whilst playingThe Kids Here Seem Pretty Normal…
-
Final Acteal Sunset
-
Luckily, the storm knocked the power out just as we'd finished cookingDinner by Candlelight
-
Las abejas run Acteal kind of like a Zapatista caracol; there's a couple shops here, but only a couple people living here semi-permanently and it's mostly used for gatherings, events and (during the time we were there) as a place of refuge. It's run by a group called the mesa directive [directing table] who are elected and vaguely analogous to the Junta de Buen Gobierno, but with longer terms and more authority. But las abejas are still primarily an indigenous organisation fighting for their rights, land and autonomy; they aren't Zapatistas, but they're sympathetic towards them.Wall Photos
Inside the mesa's office, there were several portraits: Zapata on the left, of course; Simón Pedro in the middle, who I've talked about the other day; and on the right, Samuel Ruiz. Ruiz was the bishop of San Cristóbal from 1959–1999 and a key player in the post-Zapatista Uprising peace accord negotiations and many other events in the region (including the burial of the Acteal massacre victims). Amongst the Maya he's referred to as jTatik Samuel, which means something likefather
.
I've mentioned a few cool priests during this trip, and they are not all random one-offs. Rather, they were all inspired byliberation theology
, a.k.a. the one good thing to come out of Catholicism. This was when a bunch of Catholic priests across Latin America, starting in the '60s, saw the poverty and violence surrounding them and decided to actually listen to what Jesus said about standing with the poor and the downtrodden. Whilst the Church itself generally aligned with the (say it with me now) murderous US-backed right-wing regimes throughout the following decades, those influenced by liberation theology stood with (and often died with) their victims.
Conservatives within the Church called them Marxists, and future Pope Benedict even asked them to kindly stop identifying the Catholic Church hierarchy as part of the oppressive class in Latin America. But the liberation theologists were true Christians, in thepronounce the
sense of the term. The theology is still powerful in Latin America, and quickly spread to the protestant and evangelical churches, then to the rest of the world: Black churches in the US; Dalit churches in India; and more.Christ
like you do when it's on its own
-
The side of the church has murals of Bishop Ruiz on the left and the community's priest at the time of the massacre (in which he was killed) Alonso Vasquez on the right. In the middle is a woman overlaid with a cross containing the date of the massacre, representing all of the 21 women (four of whom were pregnant) who lost their lives.Acteal Church, from the Side
-
The big church in the centre was built after the massacre. At the back of the village is another small church building, which we didn't see used for anything during the time we were there. Whilst the building itself is new, it was built on the site of the former church where many of the women tried to hide during the massacre; most were killed. The floor of the church is untiled, revealing the bare earth where the original church stood.The Old Church
A detailed account of the massacre itself is available here. Even given that it's a massacre, it's still probably more harrowing than you expect. However, the reality is not shied away from by the community, even 25 years on; from another article:
Every year, the people of Acteal relive the horror of what happened that day, recalling the events in vivid detail. Some perform re-enactments. Villagers see the ritual retelling of their story as essential, not only as a way to pay respect to the martyrs who helped bring global visibility to the guerrilla war in Chiapas, but also as a reminder to those who remain in power that the horrors that took place here will not be erased from history.
-
This is thePillar of Shame
Pillar of Shame
, which stands beside the road at the entrance to Acteal. 26 feet tall, it forms one of a series of such sculptures by Danish artist Jens Galschiøt, each installed at the site of a massacre or other tragedy.
-
25 years on, there has been no official effort to hold those ultimately responsible for the massacre to account. The murderers themselves, though initially arrested and given long sentences, were progressively released early back into the surrounding communities. Though the new AMLO government has finally acknowledged the government's role—from forming and supporting the paramilitaries in the first place to nearby Army forces not responding despite being able to hear the gunfire to then trying to quietly dispose of the bodies—their response was to try and buy the silence of the victims and survivors (and that linked article also includes several quotes from Simón Pedro, later assassinated). Some abejas took the financial settlement; don't forget, these guys are by almost all measurements dirt-poor. But the majority have refused anything less than justice being done, and I really hope that one day they get it.Bye-Bye, Acteal
-
So ends the two dullest weeks of this whole trip, and with the worst bathroom.Never Thought I'd be So Happy to be in SanCris
We've both been ill most of the brigade. I started ill, got a bit better around the midpoint and then either relapsed or got a fresh new cold. We've been blowing our way through our toilet paper supplied and ran out yesterday. So, when the mesa directiva invited us to a parting coffee this morning (before a ~2hr and very windy drive) I was a bit nervous, but then it turned out there was no coffee; only some nice lemon tea.
The journey was uneventful, and the mountain ranges appeared very strange and alien as we rose out of the valley, because I'd decided to listen to Huun-Huur-Tu in the taxi. We gave the outgoing group a quick debrief and then I headed off to my hotel, which turned out to be a much shorter walk than I'd expected.
I'm in room #46, but that turned out to only be on the second floor. The shower looked unimpressive until I turned it on and realised it's probably the best I've had in month. I'd had almost exactly as many pesos as I needed to pay for my hotel room, so I went out to the ATM and found it with no queue, and it worked first time. I went to a place I've been a few times before for their breakfast of the day, and it turned out to be exactly what I didn't know I needed after two weeks of mostly rice: enfrijoladas montadas con carne. I also had a carrot cake, because why not.
Later, back in my room, I went to wash my hands and realised there was no soap. I was thinking I'd have to traipse down to the reception to ask for them, when I realised there was some on my side table. Then, as I went through my bags, I found another bar hidden away that'll do me as a backup for the rest of my time in Mexico.
I turned on my laptop and realised I hadn't taken a photo of the Wi-Fi login back at the reception. But then (and by this time I was starting to predict ways things could work out) it turns out I can view saved Wi-Fi passwords on my phone. I noticed the hotel offer a laundry service and it turned out to be pretty cheap, and they said they'd have the clothes ready by the morning.
For dinner I looked up a pizza place someone had recommended to me, and it was a bit far. BUT there was another pizza place about half the distance away. I went and got a pizza to go, and on my way home realised I had no hot sauce. But, as I had kind of assumed, there was a tub of the stuff included in with the pizza, and it was one of the best hot sauces I've ever tasted. AND when I got back, they told me they'd done my clothes already.
So now I've got three nights in a nice swish hotel (read: the cheapest place in SanCris that offers private rooms and private bathrooms). We've got a final brigade debrief tomorrow afternoon, but we already wrote up our report as we went along so other than that I've just downloaded a bunch of games and I don't think I'm going to leave this room very much. Then, on Saturday evening, I'm hopping on a redeye coach to Huatulco, Oaxaca: storms or no storms, Ben's off to the beach!
Sometimes you have a period of time where everything is just peachy. I'm one day into one. I'm happy to be back in San Cris, I'm excited to make my way up the rest of Mexico and I'm fully made up.
-
Unfortunately the asshole in question seems to work at the church across the road, so he also has access to bellsIt Takes a Special Kind of Asshole to Decide 6–7am is an Appropriate Time for a Fireworks Display
-
Unfortunately the asshole in question seems to work at the church across the road, so he also has access to bellsIt Takes a Special Kind of Asshole to Decide 6–7am is an Appropriate Time for a Fireworks Display
-
The old 200 has the same face as the new 100s!Further Sins of the Mexican Peso
-
The end is increasingly nigh…Finally Booked My Flights Home
-
Graphics card prices seem to have returned to normal after a crazy couple years, just in time for me to buy a new one to upgrade my PC when I get home. I've not gone for the fanciest ever, but since I'm currently using a GTX 460 (released in 2010) I think basically anything would be a huge jump. Especially anything post-2015, so I can use all the Vulkan magic that's finally made gaming on Linux possible.More Good Homecoming News
-
The weather forecast for San Cris looks about the same as Huatulco, but it's been uninterrupted sunshine since I got back.Things Are Looking Promising for Operation Benny-Wants-Beachy
-
No sign of rain, but it's pretty consistently overcast, so not ideal beach sunbathing weather.Well, It's Certainly Hot and Humid Here
-
I'm finally caught up to the country I'm currently in, for the first time in quite a while!New Blog Post: Honduras & Guatemala
In which I Uber my way out of a kidnapping, rekindle my love affair with hammocks and sink to new depths.
Read it here. -
Perhaps a smarter man than I wouldn't have left visiting the remote beach for the morning before his flight, but that smarter man would've missed out on the first day of blistering sunshine since I got here, and meeting someone at the hostel to go with. Score one for the dumber man!Benny-Gottie-His-Beachie
-
This is where they filmed the final scenes of Y tu mamá también, one the best (and most bittersweet) films I've ever seen.Playa Cacaluta
-
Untitled
-
The beach was so steep you could practically see the riptides; some of the waves crashed taller than meNot Ideal Swimming Conditions
[The video 'playa-cacaluta.webm' has not yet been uploaded, try again later.]
-
[Photo credit: Diana]Last-Ditch Tan-Evening Effort
-
Can't Say I've Seen a Thatched Airport Before
-
Big Fan of This Airport Décor
-
Misty Plane
[The video 'plane-mist.webm' has not yet been uploaded, try again later.]
-
Very Neat Cloud
-
Cities are terribleLovely Welcoming Smog
-
And an alarming number of fire extinguishersThere Appears to Be a Wheel Arch in My Corridor
-
Cheers guysThe Hostel Gave Me My 100 Pesos Change in a Stack of 5-Peso Coins
-
Anyone who likes them is immediately suspectCities are Shit
[The recording 'cdmx-horns.ogg' has not yet been uploaded, try again later.]
-
So far Mexico City is shaping up to be the bust of the trip; good thing I have my flip-flopsThe Laundrette Stole My Socks
-
It's 6:30 in the morning and the asshole three doors down has his wide open and is blaring reggaeton out of his phone whilst he and his girlfriend pack.Latinos and Me are Officially on a Break
-
Street food was good tooThe Highlight of My Stay in Mexico City is Getting Up at 4am to Leave It
-
It's been a wild 9-ish months. Hasta luegoAdios, Latin America
-
…I realise a smarter man would've waited till he was out of the country to stick a big Zapatista sticker on his laptopHaving Just Been Through Mexican Airport Security Twice in the Past Week…
